November 16, 1997

By DAVID MURRAY

THE GOOD NAZI
The Life and Lies of Albert Speer. By Dan van der Vat.
Houghton Mifflin, $30.

ost of the men in Adolf Hitler's coterie were unmitigated louts, crude bullies seeking their own, and Germany's, selfish ends. Here and there, however, were exceptions, men of intellectual and administrative ability. Such was Albert Speer, close to the throne but seemingly always aloof from the horrors of Nazism. An engineer and architect, he was a technocrat, Hitler's young master builder, the draftsman for Germania, the monumental design for a victorious postwar Berlin. But in 1942, Hitler made him minister for armaments and munitions, a task to which Speer brought outstanding resourcefulness and flexibility, keeping the German war machine running. Indeed, in 1944, in the face of defeat, Speer blunted Hitler's drive for ''miracle weapons'' to concentrate on essentials, most notably producing more than 3,000 combat aircraft a month to offset the Allied bombing campaign. In 1946, on trial as a war criminal, Speer was just as flexible and resourceful in masking his knowledge of crimes like the genocidal persecution of the Jews. Dan van der Vat, a Dutch-born British journalist, makes an effective case in ''The Good Nazi,'' a well-written and skeptical account, that while the slippery Speer knew for years about the atrocities, he was able to pretend that he only ''suspected . . . that something appalling was happening'' to Europe's Jews. As a result, he was one of only two top-ranking Nazis to escape the hangman, drawing a 20-year prison sentence instead.